Marketing ebbs and flows in terms of the strategies, tactics, and plans that are implemented. A business or project team must understand where they are in the marketing process. A business can be in a certain marketing phase, while a product launch or brand itself is within a different phase. This must be considered when creating your marketing plan and choosing your strategies.
At it’s simplest, marketing involves a simple flow of three steps: Analyze, Plan, Implement – then repeat. We must distinguish the marketing phases from sales phases. Sales occur within all phases of marketing. The sales process is also a straightforward process of finding, engaging, converting, and retaining your audience. Again, the sales process occurs through the phases of marketing.
What Are the Six Phases of Marketing?
The six phases of marketing are foundations, goal-setting, analysis & refinement, strategy formation, strategy monitoring, and corporate marketing.
Use our free analysis tool to determine where you are in your marketing process.
Marketing Strategy Guide for Each Phase
We prepared a strategy guide to match each phase of marketing. When you use the marketing analysis tool, we’ll email the guide for your phase. The guide includes a list of strategies to use for your current marketing phase, an action plan, and pitfalls to avoid.
Just like the sales process described above, there are essential elements of any marketing plan:
- Data to inform your strategy.
- An objective to guide your strategy.
- A strategy for analyzing and applying your data.
- Metrics to track success.
But applying these elements to your business, brand, or product launch is not enough.
The objective must align with the objectives for your phase of marketing. The same is true for strategies and metrics to track. There are objectives and key performance indicators that make sense and get better results related to each of the 6 phases of marketing.
Which phase of marketing is your business in? Which phase matches your newest product release? Do you or your marketing team know the best practices for that phase of marketing?
Start the marketing analysis tool, and we’ll give you the basics you need to accelerate your results.
More Strategy Resources
Find more help with your marketing plan from our blog. Here are two recent articles with strategy ideas that can apply to any phase of marketing.
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